Stomatal responses to humidity: has the ‘black box’ finally been opened?

Noninvasive ventilation: has Pandora’s box been opened?

Exacerbations of COPD are the largest single cause of hospital admission with respiratory disease, and are frequently associated with impaired gas exchange and mortality rates of up to 14%. 1 Acute hypercapnic respiratory failure leads to admissions to intensive care units with a mortality rate of 59% at one year. 2 Noninvasive ventilation (NIV) is a well established and validated therapy for a...

The Sodium “Leak” Has Finally Been Plugged

Most electrophysiologists generally do not speak highly of leak currents. In reality, these conductances represent a crucial functional mechanism by which neurons control resting membrane potentials. A new study in Cell by Lu et al. has surprisingly confirmed the identity of the long-sought voltage-insensitive sodium leak conductance to be encoded by the third branch of the voltage-gated sodium...

New insights in IBS-like disorders: Pandora's box has been opened; a review

The most complained gastrointestinal symptoms are chronic diarrhea, bloating and abdominal pain. Once malignancies and inflammatory bowel diseases are excluded, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and the so called "IBS-like disorders" should be taken into account. The relationship between IBS as defined by Rome IV criteria and these clinical conditions is sometimes obscure, since many IBS patients ...

The Nature of Man―has the Ghost in the Machine Finally been Exorcised?

The machine Gilbert Ryle expressed the scepticism of the age when he disparagingly referred to the traditional notion of man as composed of a spirit interacting with a brain as ‘the ghost in the machine’. For centuries dualism had been the prevalent view amongst philosophers, found embryonically in Plato and reaching its classical statement in Descartes. Man’s composite nature has also been ass...

The low incidence of cervical cancer in Jewish women: has the puzzle finally been solved?